A lack of money also served to keep down desertion, as soldiers simply could not afford to run away. Any non-Virginian who wanted to return home would have to travel hundreds of miles, trading all the while with local farmers. Zimmerman captured the financial realities of deserting when he wrote in August: “We are all out of money here….I think as soon as they get money a lot of them will leave [as] that is all that has kept them here this long.”

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Factors such poor food, bad leadership, combat fatigue and hard marching figured into the decision to bolt from the army, but the ways soldiers protested their sorry lot were extraordinarily diverse, as every man had his own limits, contended with his own private issues and faced different living conditions and political circumstances.

There was, however, one common concern among all deserters. Would resistance to or evasion of military service be a futile act that could end in even more hardship or possibly death?

Most Southern soldiers usually judged an assault against military authority as akin to suicide, but there were times when they found an opening to exploit to their advantage. Such openings appeared when the army lost the ability to control enlisted men. After Gettysburg, that occurred when profound structural shifts in the Army of Northern Virginia created opportunities that soldiers quickly exploited.

This breakdown in order was made worse in early August, when Jefferson Davis’ Amnesty Proclamation pardoned any absent soldier who returned to the ranks within 20 days of leaving. Although Davis was clear that the amnesty applied to men who were currently absent without permission, scores of soldiers interpreted his words to mean that they could leave their posts immediately as long as they returned within the stipulated 20 days.

Less than two weeks after Davis’ proclamation, Lee sent the president an urgent message, telling him that the amnesty had inspired a new wave of deserters. “The number of desertions from the army is so great and still continues to such an extent,” Lee wrote on August 17, “that unless some cessation of them can be caused I fear success in the field will be seriously endangered.” Two days before writing this dispatch the general was informed that bands of soldiers were leaving their regiments, in some cases as many as 30 from a single unit. Although Lee had favored the amnesty proclamation, he tweaked Davis’ order and instituted a system of furloughs that would grant leave at the rate of one man for every 100 soldiers present for duty.

Lee’s furlough policy did not close the escape hatch that Davis’ amnesty proclamation had unintentionally opened. In fact, the new furlough policy was largely ridiculed by the men, who insisted that there was even less of a chance of securing official permission to go home after Gettysburg. One Confederate calculated that it would take three to four years for all the men in his unit to receive a furlough home.

Frustration among the rank and file must have also increased because Lee stipulated that the new furlough system should give preference to “the most urgent and meritorious cases.” Officers who made such a determination were undoubtedly seen as playing favorites by those refused a pass and stuck in camp. A Virginia soldier spoke to the frustration of his comrades after Lee’s furlough policy when he wrote, “The captain told me that he would let me go home in September but he is so down on me now that I don’t think he will let me (go) then, for I have been tilling him just what I think of him and damn his sole if he don’t mind I will put him through yet…for he is the damest Raskal that ever I had enny thing to doo with in my life.”

In the end, Lee’s furlough system extinguished the hopes of many men who were already outraged by the army’s failure to uphold the legal right to a furlough. After Wagner’s wife asked him to “beg” for a furlough, he replied that “I can say to you a man mite as well beg for peese[.] They would git Jest as soone as a furlow.” Wagner and Zimmerman did not desert, but undoubtedly some did go home, believing that they faced indefinite military service.

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